While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother's tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother Natsuko, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the boy's mother. As he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger following the appearance of a persistent gray heron, who perplexes and bedevils Mahito, dubbing him the "long-awaited one."
A lonely magazine editor finds romance with his personal trainer until a confession changes everything. Based on the novel by Makoto Takayama.
Somewhere at Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture lives a woman and her son. The woman is Mashiro Aoi who has lost her husband and bookstore cum home from the Tohoku earthquake. It has been 10 years since the disaster and Aoi decides to renovate a vacant place and reopen the bookstore which her late husband used to love. Aoi then meets an architect, Hayama Eiki who is not good at socialising. However, after much interactions, they begin to get attracted to each other.
Okawa Yuka is living out the daily motions of life but doesn't understand her reason to keep living. After a confrontation with a co-worker, she decides to end it all but fails when she stops herself from squishing a cicada. That cicada returns the favor by transforming into a man, named semi, for seven days because he thinks it will make her happy. The downside is, he has no idea how to live as a human.
Wakaba is a 2nd grade high school student in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. When Wakaba was little, she admired the cheerleading club "JETS” from Fukui Chuo High School in Fukui Prefecture. She dreamed of joining the "JETS,” but she thought it was impossible for her to join and enrolled at another high school. One day, a transfer student from Tokyo talks to Wakaba and proposes "let's do cheer dance together."
A CEO struggling to maintain his small sock business risks the company's future with a new challenge — creating a line of running shoes.
Sawako Agawa (阿川 佐和子, Agawa Sawako, November 1, 1953) is a Japanese essayist, novelist and actress from Tokyo.